Fortunately, I had a plan B, in that I'd kind of wanted to see the preview of Play Dirty but Elvis was blocking it. I was mildly surprised it was so quiet, even for being late-ish - scheduled start time was 9pm, probably to accommodate the post-screening Q&A that was happening on the west coast (and presumably everyone at that location getting to their seats was why it started 20 minutes late or so) - because I figured Mark Wahlberg would have some local fans and there were probably people like me who wanted to see "Shane Black doing Richard Stark's Parker" on the big screen rather than Amazon. Pretty quiet, though; the front section was folks who go to enough previews that they not only know what Allied is but local reps' names and some people who seemed to have walked in just looking to see whatever was playing at 8:30 or so, when that theater isn't usually open on weekdays. Anyway, glad to see folks are apparently still thinking "let's see a movie" and showing up to see what it is.
The next two days were at Fenway Park, though: a frustrating loss to the A's on Tuesday, the second game in a row where I watched Greg Weissert let inherited runners score and ruin a fun game with a young pitcher making their first start at Fenway Park; then a 10-inning walk-off win on Wednesday. Only a little baseball left at Fenway this year, so I'm catching a fair amount while I can.
Thursday night, I hit the night-before show of Afterburn, which has a premise that probably deserves a bigger budget than it got. The next night was the rare second trip to the Seaport in a week because the Alamo was actually playing things I couldn't see without getting on the airport bus, for Adulthood.
Saturday night, I opted to head to the Coolidge for the late show of Peking Opera Blues, knowing full well from a couple weeks ago that the MBTA's new later hour(s) are kind of unevenly applied and I (a) had a Hong Kong Blu-ray still in the plastic and (b) would be receiving the new Shout Factory UHD on Tuesday. No regrets, though; it's great with a crowd and on the big screen. I really hope the Brattle or Somerville has the Shout restorations at a reasonable hour sometime later this fall, because you've got to think people would show up for Hard Boiled projected in 4K laser if they could get home afterward.
Because those later trains are kind of only good in one direction at 2am, as people try to get from downtown to the suburbs: Both times, there were a couple more outbound green line trains at Coolidge Corner but no more inbound, so my route home was "take the 66 bus to Harvard and then walk 45 minutes at 3am"), and, yeah, that messed me up for the next day or so, such that I finally got to the second-to-last show of Honey Don't!", and, yeah, I'd like to see the Coens working together rather than separately.
So that's one week caught up; follow my Letterboxd account for first (and, sadly, sometimes the only) drafts.
Play Dirty
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 September 2025 in Alamo Seaport #5 (preview, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link)
I suppose that Play Dirty mostly suffers in comparison to other things, and not writer/director Shane Black's other movies or Point Blank (not just one of my favorite Stark adaptations, but one of my favorite movies, period): I saw it 24 hours after Night of the Juggler and, boy, does the difference between that movie's real cars scraping and smashing each other while this one's digital simulations fly through the air not favor the newer movie. That's on top of Mark Wahlberg just not being in Lee Marvin's league as Parker, even if Marvin didn't use the name. That was a given, after all.
But then, Shane Black seems to be channeling Donald E. Westlake more than his alias Richard Stark, throwing off smart aleck comments and smirking at mayhem in a way that doesn't quite work if you're expecting a story about a cool, professional thief. It's not up there with his best; the Christmas setting seems more obligatory than mood-enhancing, for instance, and there's almost too much action before the big finale. It's still a Shane Black film, at least, with some fun characters, wry genre-awareness, and enough love of pulp to build a heist around sunken treasure.
Maybe coming in without expectations would help, but it just feels second-rate in a lot of ways. Wahlberg isn't just no Parker, but his character with that name isn't really anything, apparently by design (during the live-streamed Q&A, Black talked about giving him an origin story that makes him more likable, something Westlake avoided), not the guy for a story where the suspense seems to be built out of what sort of amorality will win Parker over: Will he team with Zen because the score is big enough to put past differences behind them, or take her out because not looking out for your partners is bad for business? Rosa Salazar gives a performance as Zen that suggests her talk about falling for Parker by the end is real, but everything that would make the audience believe it is cut out. The action is big but flimsy-looking, and there's never really a space where it slows down enough to get at the characters or genre trappings the way Black's best movies do.
I do kind of love LaKeith Stanfield's Grofield, though I haven't read enough of the books to tell how true he is to the source material. He's great, though, easy to believe as both Parker's trusted ally, and someone who approaches his life of crime from a completely different direction. He just wants to run a little experimental theater that can't possibly turn a profit, so the way to fund it is by being good at stealing. In a lot of ways, that's something an audience can connect with a lot better than Parker, and Stanfield's energetic performance easily steals the show.
Afterburn
* * (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Hey, Nimród Antal with a screenplay credit! Seems like it's been a while, but Retribution was just a couple years ago. Not that he and the other writers necessarily turned in a great script, but it's kind of let down by the execution.
That comes right at the start, as the opening narration is kind of the movie in miniature: Dave Bautista more or less sells a pretty roughly-scripted bit about how his character is probably the greatest treasure hunter in a post-apocalyptic world, where a massive solar flare has burned out all modern electronics and seen an almost universal collapse of the world's governments. The next couple hours is all going to be Bautista making what seems like much more of an effort than seemingly anyone else involved, or at least being the guy whose natural charisma comes through in the edit, as he gets sent to France to recover the Mona Lisa for "King" August (Samuel L. Jackson), who feels re-opening museums will give him more legitimacy than other pretenders who are only trying to use force. He's to hook up with local resistance fighter Drea (Olga Kurylenko) and avoid the forces of Vokov (Kristofer Hivju), the Russian warlord who controls most of France.
I kind of wonder if the original comic is a bit more ambitious, with missions to recognizable locations and crazier MacGyvering when he gets there. That feels like the fun high concept being crammed into what would have been a direct to video production if there weren't theaters with 19 screens to fill in 2025. It feels like the same industrial park in Slovakia is being used for three or four different set pieces and every French "city" looks like the European equivalent of a Wild West Town standing set for WWI/WWII movies. It's not cheap, exactly, and director J.J. Perry is a stunt/action pro - there are some decently-staged fights - but he's seemingly very limited in what can be done, and it's clear that he maybe has Samuel L. Jackson for something like two days to shoot four or five scenes.
The film's got Bautista, at least, who pulls off the eccentric hero thing fairly well, dropping dry one-liners that work whether he's in a cynical-badass position or not knowing what he's wound up in the middle of. The action is mostly capable, with a comic book bloodiness that the filmmakers seemingly couldn't decide whether they were leaning into it or playing it down once they got to the editing room as the film cuts mid-mayhem. They've got the right idea seeing the finale on a train in a way that plays into how the baddie is supposed to be a larger-than-life supervillain, though he doesn't have the charisma for it.
This feels like it could have been a really fun late-1990s blockbuster - think something like Judge Dredd or The Fifth Element with big world-building and practical effects at their peak - but maybe doesn't make for great D2V fare in any era.
Adulthood
* * (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2025 in Alamo Seaport #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link)
I honestly can't remember whether I dislike Josh Gad in general or if I just get him confused with Jonah Hill, but it's possible that both things are true because he's sort of who you get when Hill isn't available. This thought is probably not the best mindset to bring into a movie, and, yes, he got on my nerves early in this one and never offered much more than obnoxiousness, and the rest of the movie tended to follow suit. His character is a screenwriter, and I'll bet he's one who thinks his best work involves characters who are dark or amoral even if they're not exactly resonant or interesting.
There's an interesting setup here, with the adult children (Gad, Kaya Scodelario) of a woman who has suffered a stroke discovering a long-hidden corpse in the basement, and soon find themselves blackmailed by their home-care worker (Billie Lourd). It's Dumb Crime from there, but without much in the way of humanizing details that make people falling short of their ideals compelling. At every step it looks like it should be good - you can see the way this is being structured with twists and screw-ups - but it's only occasionally darkly funny or urgent. The plans these folks come up with are neither clever with a massive hidden flaw nor foolish enough that one is waiting for them to fall apart. It's just the first thing one would think of once one has decided they're not calling the cops.
Like a lot of movies that flop around like this one, there's some good stuff underneath. The set-up seems to represent the conditionality of a middle-class suburb a lot more than many movies that are specifically about it - it's implied that a great deal of the town's population has turned over since the siblings left school, but there are just enough old-timers to make things really difficult. There's tension between where one is now and the cousins with whom you were close as kids who haven't risen socially. It's not about health care, but that can ruin them, between how damages could ruin the ability to pay for their mother's care and how dangerous outsourcing it winds up being. Unfortunately, this is mostly just mentioned as explanation for what they're doing, and only rarely comes to the fore - there's a scene where cousin Bodie (Anthony Carrigan) joins family dinner that gets the sense of discomfort right even if the jokes don't really land, but that's mostly it.
And, ultimately, the points being hammered home at the end aren't really what the movie has been about - it suddenly becomes about Meg seizing the position of head of the family, but it sure takes a roundabout route to get there - but there's a long monologue anyway. There's the outline of a good crime movie here, but none of the details.
Do ma daan (Peking Opera Blues)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20-21 September 2025 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #5 (After Midnite, DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the UHD/Blu-ray at Amazon
This may just have become my favorite Tsui Hark film. Peking Opera Blues feels almost effortless in how it slides between its thriller and comedy elements, with just enough characters to make the juggling act impressive but never losing track of anyone. It's a simple plot with constant forward motion, with the little shell games that play out keeping one attentive where the larger ones are concerned. It's three clever ladies all have distinct goals that the filmmakers intertwine exceptionally well; even if Brigitte Lin's story winds up driving the story by the end, the others have been pulled in.
And, just for a bit of fun, I dig the gender-bending on display - Lin plays a general's androgynous but sexy daughter, there are actors playing women and insisting nobody would actually want to see actual ladies in an opera, except the girl pretending to be a man playing a woman - especially since it's not just kinky, but keeps the idea that folks may not be who they seem front and center but playful. Hark also seems to be having a great time with how the choreographed swordplay in the opera reflects the chaotic, but ultimately operatic, violence outside of it. It's not quite overt enough to be meta, but on some level he's connecting how much we in the audience enjoy this action but have to recognize it as life-and-death for the characters.
The only downside, maybe, is that all that action means you can kind of lose track of the villains by the end, as all the guys with competing agendas turn on each other so that the heroes have new opponents to deal with, and it can kind of make one forget what this is all about again. It's a thrilling run, and Hark eventually does the quick Shaw Brothers ending, which is fun, so one can't really complain too much.
Throw in a really enjoyable cast that sells the heck out of this group becoming close enough to put themselves in danger for each other by the end, and the whole thing is a real delight.
Honey Don't!
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or pre-order the Blu-rayat Amazon
It's going to be interesting the next time the Coen Brothers make a movie together, isn't it, depending on how the one Joel's currently shooting in Scotland turns out, especially since Ace of Spades sounds like it could be a Chandler-esque mystery? Both of the movies Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke have are genuinely messy in the way that the brothers' films only have the appearance of shagginess, and this one in particular feels like the sort of riff on Raymond Chandler that folks often describe The Big Lebowski as being. Honey is Chandler's knight-errant, seemingly stumbling around Bakersfield without an actual case because she can't help trying to do the right thing even though she knows it's not her actual job.
It's not messy in the right way, though, inasmuch as there is a right way and a wrong way. One can sense Honey (Margaret Qualley) trying to find reasons to be involved in something, and this other thing going on which is being set up as part of something bigger, and then there's this whole other couple of things. It makes me wonder if what's going on in the last act was the material Coen and Cooke started with - the wisecracking private eye having to dig into something close to home - but wound up spending a lot of time on the ramp-up and shift that comes after is fairly unsatisfying.
I kind of think I'd like a Honey Don't! TV series starring Margaret Qualley, though; she's doing a bit of a James Garner thing with her cool confidence and between her family, assistant, and the amiable cop who doesn't let her liking girls stop his flirting, there's a solid supporting cast. Come up with a dozen cases a year - maybe she's the only P.I. in the area that specializes in cases involving the LGBTQ+ community - and you've got the bones of a good mystery-of-the-week show. The movie's plot threads could be unwound into two episodes and maybe be stronger for it, but it doesn't quite work as 90 minutes of movie.
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